His viewing done, he turned into the cemetery, thinking of his dead wife. Marjorie would have volunteered to take care of this misbegotten place. Marjorie this, Marjorie that, he thought. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. The sandy soil made the graves look lumpy and unkempt. He wandered among the headstones, thinking that soon enough, there would be one for him. When he was young, the thought would have paralyzed him. Now it soothed him. Once you get to a certain point, death is the only thing that makes sense.
At the edge of the cemetery, overlooking the sea, was a small memorial. It was nothing more than a stone set on pitted concrete. But something about it called to him. Maybe it was the single name, carved into the rock. Maybe it was the epitaph.Lost in the sea but not from our hearts.He surmised from the epitaph that the body had never been found. Someone had scattered seashells over the ground, as if in offering.
Or maybe, he thought, it was the age of the boy who’d died. Dennis Owen, age nine.
There were no names of his surviving family, no quotes from his loving parents.
It was all a bit of a mystery.
2
Morning came, a pale shape through the bedroom windows. Larry was beginning to think he was going mad. He was aimless with boredom. He and Marjorie had never had kids, and the work had eaten away at his friendships as it so often did, so by the end, it was just him and Marjorie. Somehow, the miracle of her love was that it kept part of him pure. But only for Marjorie.
He bought his meals at the market because he didn’t want to cook. He didn’t want to clean. He didn’t want to play checkers by himself. But he also didn’t reach out to anyone back in Portland. He didn’t think they cared.
Instead, he wandered, trudging up and down the beach until the spray coated his face with something like tears. You’re grieving, his mind told him, but he didn’t think that was true. A love as long as he and Marjorie had had couldn’t be contained in one simple word. There really was no way to explain it.
He was walking back up the dune when he saw the young woman. Her blond hair was loose, blowing over the shoulders of her parka. He thought of the weather alert he had heard on the radio that morning. Storms were set to sweep the beach. Batten down. It was abrave visitor, he thought, to chance getting trapped here during a spring storm. But then, strangers often had no idea of the storms’ ferocity.
As he watched, the young woman walked away from her car, which she’d parked at the side of the road, and went into the cemetery. He followed her, curious.
She was looking for someone’s grave, that much was clear. He watched as she stopped and read the headstones. Getting closer, he judged her to be somewhere in her twenties. She had a smooth, freckled face, and her eyes were a very dark blue.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
She gave him a cautious smile.
“I’m looking for a memorial,” she said. “For a boy. He died a long time ago. He was swept away in the sea.”
He nodded, feeling the sandy air stir the hair around his ears.
“Right this way. I think I know where it is.”
He led her to the memorial overlooking the ocean. When she read the name, Dennis Owen, her expression changed. Suddenly, Larry was looking at his own grief, in a much younger face. It was the grief of someone who has no idea what they have lost.
She turned her eyes from the memorial to the sea. It was thick and heavy looking that day, a deep, swollen blue reflected against a sullen plum sky. It was always this way before storms. It was like the ocean was gathering force, like a boxer coiling her mighty, frothy fist.
He wondered if he should leave, give the young woman some privacy.
“I wonder why they put it here,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?”
“Here, where he can see the ocean.”
“I don’t think they actually found him, miss.”
“You’re right. I meant, why put his memorial here, in sight of the sea that killed him?”
Larry didn’t have an answer to that. A strand of her hair blew into her face, and she brushed it away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being rude. My name is Amanda Dufresne.”
“Larry Palmer,” he said.
A sharp wind came suddenly, off the ocean. It rushed up the dune, startling them. The sea was gathering under the angry sky, and in the distance, he could see the thick dark clouds that warned of storms. Sometimes the storms were so bad, they turned into cyclones. The beach was a hazard then, and to stay outside anywhere was a risk. At best, the young woman would get doused. At worst, she was at risk of being killed by a falling tree or literally swept away.
“We got a storm coming in,” he said.
